Whenever the idea of upgrading and expanding public transportation is Boston comes up, the state legislature balks because of the seemingly high cost. But what does it really cost? Boston has five major arteries feeding into it. On an annual basis, it cost roughly $50,000 to maintain each of these roads. And when it comes to resurfacing or rebuilding, the cost zooms to $1.5 to $2 million per mile! And there are other costs associated with these roads as well. And when you consider how far people are willing to commute, you must go at least 50 miles out from Boston’s center. A bit of simple math shows how costs quickly zoom into the 100s of millions of dollars. This does not take into account the intangibles such as how likely a company is to move into the Boston area considering the constant congestion of its highways.
The MBTA recently announced it is consider running electric trains on its Providence to Boston route to see how well they work. I find this curious because the Massachusetts Department of Transportation need only confer with the New York area rail providers to see how well they work. If the Massachusetts legislature had a lick of sense, it would provide the Mass DOT with the funding to simply go out and purchase new electrified coaches and put them into service.
The upside of the electric railcar is that it can be used in a fashion similar to rapid transit, short distance routes with a high frequency of service. An example of a route which begs this kind of service is the Fairmont Line. This route run entirely within the city of Boston but constantly struggles for ridership. Were this route electrified with trains running every 10 to 15 minutes is would become extremely attractive.
Other routes which would become more attractive from frequently running trains are the Framingham to Boston, Waltham to Boston (with the addition of more stations, ie. Beaver Brook, Fresh Pond), Woburn (Anderson) to Boston, Reading to Boston, and Beverly to Boston.
Each of these routes, except the Beverly line, intersects with the interstate highway system. At present, there are no stations at these intersections. But by addling large parking garages with highway exits will certain draw a healthy percentage of present commuters to the trains. If a commuter knows that on these lines, he is never more than 15 or 20 minutes from a train, it is obviously attractive.
The conventional trains that would continue to use these lines from the stations further out would benefit from being able to run express during rush hours. That means people commuting in on these trains from places such as Rockport, Haverhill, Concord/Fitchburg and other destinations would see their travel time reduced. Additionally, the sensation that the train runs slowly because it stops at every station would also be alleviated.
The MBTA and Mass DOT would do well, regardless of how it proceeds, to take a careful look at parking availability at each of its stations. Any station which is, or has the potential, to be heavily used, should have a minimum of 1000 parking spaces. Reading is an excellent example of a station desperately in need of expanded parking as does Wakefield on that route. Reading has a total of 71 parking spaces and Wakefield 116. In each case the availability of land is at a premium but midway between these stations runs I-95/128 where there are large swarths of land which could be used with the addition of a station plus a large parking garage.
There are three routes which are begging for expansion which can be accomplished for relatively modest sums of money. The Haverhill route can be moved northward to a point named Rosemont just south of the New Hampshire state line and on Route 125, an extremely heavily traveled road. In the process it passes beneath I-495 affording a 2nd station. The next is the Lowell line being extended to a point just south on Nashua in Tyngsboro. Right now the traffic of Route 3 has no convenient station. The first mall in Nashua has a parking lot which extends into Massachusetts and has an excellent exit from Route 3 less than a mile away. And finally, extending the Framingham/Worcester line to Springfield seems like a no brainer. The track is already up to passenger standards and there is an active rail passenger station in Springfield. This route would also service Ludlow, Palmer, Brookfield and Spenser.
These solutions will cost in the multiple of billions of dollars but here is one additional thought to make that seem less imposing. The average length of an automobile is just under 20 feet while the average length of a rail car is over 60 feet. Most automobiles carry a single person while a railcar can accommodate upwards of 100 people per car. If these rail cars are only used at 50% of their capacity they are still taking about 150 automobiles off the road per rail car used.
railroads
Dealing With Traffic Congestion in America’s Cities
Even though I am addressing the growing problem of congestion in America’s cities, I am going to refer almost entirely to Boston as it is the city I am most familiar with. In an article in today’s (August 5, 2012) Boston Globe entitled “Teh cure for congestion” p. K10 by Derrick Z. Jackson, the method Stockholm Sweden used is put forth. In 2006, it states, Stockholm began a 7-month trial where it charged each automobile entering the city about $1.50 on off-peak hours and about $3 during peak traffic hours. It used 18 city entry points armed with cameras that took photos of the license plates of cars entering the city and sent the charges to the registered owners. Public opposition t this idea ran as high as 75%. But at the end of the trial period the amount of traffic entering the city had been reduced by 22%, and when the measure was put to the vote, the public passed the measure to make it permanent.
In 1991 I attended a professional conference initiated by then Senator Paul Tsongas at the University of New Hampshire where professional traffic management specialists put on a symposium. At the time Boston’s “Big Dig” was in its infancy. Even so, for reasons that eluded rational and reasonable explanation, the plan for the North/South rail link had been discarded. And this in spite of the fact that it had been fully engineered and was included in the original plans. For those of you unfamiliar with Boston, the city has two rail terminus, one called North Station and the other, South Station. This is, and never has been, a rail line that links the two which has meant passengers coming from north of Boston have had to use other means of transportation to get them to South Station so they could continue the journey, if the so desired. The additional cost of the North/South link, had it been carried out, would have cost in the tens of millions of dollars in a project that ended up costing over $15 billion.
But such short-sightedness, and political chicanery, not unusual in the world of Massachusetts politics. To the contrary, anyone who lives in the state knows only too well the state in known for its political patronage which Bay Staters have been at a loss to do much about.
Curiously, Boston is home to one of the foremost schools for urban planning which exists within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Moreover, the U.S. Department of Transportation has one of its larger research and development centers in Cambridge at the Volpe Center. M.I.T. and the Volpe Center sit side-by-side not coincidentally. But Massachusetts, in its infinite wisdom, has seldom seen fit to avail itself of these facilities most likely because its political influence does not extend to either. By extension, if you look at other major American cities, you can find other private facilities which would welcome public monies in a state’s efforts to deal with its transportation problems. These institutions, having no political agenda, would likely give a comprehensive and reason response to any transportation problem which is happening the city and state in which they reside. And for far fewer dollars than corporate America can deliver with a product that would challenge any.
All major cities need a comprehensive system of rapid transportation. By definition, that means subways systems and street cars, and any other facility whose movement is affected little, if at all, by street congestion.
Boston’s subway, the oldest in the nation, though by definition is a rapid transit system, suffers from its own form of congestion which during rush hours frequently renders it little faster than the street level automobile. Worse yet, the infrastructure of the subway system itself is in need of extensive repair and rebuilding. This, of course, is costly. Worse, the system, the MBTA, is currently in debt to the tune of over $100 million. The political response to this problem has been to raise fares, reduce service, and leave the long-term problems unanswered and unaddressed. Other systems, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Chicago, I have little doubt, suffer from similar problems.
What Americans do not understand, and which was brought out in detail at that 1991 conference, is that is costs many times more to maintain the nation’s roads per mile than it does to maintain the right-of-way for rapid transit and commuter trains. Even more, public transportation has the ability to carry many more people between any two points per hour than even the best highway.
Why don’t Americans abandon their cars for the more economical and fiscally responsible public transportation. Unfortunately public transportation has the tendency to be unreliable, uncomfortable, inconvenient and largely unattractive. The “park and ride” facilities are frequently too small and inconveniently located. Those that are heavily used tend to fill up early which provides a disincentive to the later commuter to even consider them. In Massachusetts, for example, there is only one parking facility, the Interstate 95/Route 128 facility, that resides immediately next to a heavily used highway. But there are more than 10 places where the commuter rail intersects with an Interstate highway. Urban planners know, or should know, that easy of access is key to ridership in public transportation. But Massachusetts, which has been increasing the size of its commuter rail had done absolutely nothing to address this.
The incentive to use public transportation, as shown in Stockholm, must be balanced with a disincentive to use the automobile. Any person who has ever traveled to western Europe or the Far East and used their public transportation systems, knows how superior those systems are to any that presently exist in the United States. In the world arena of public transportation, the United States is little more than a third-world country.
One thing the American public needs, to help it embrace public transportation, is knowledge of the cost to maintain a road per mile. Politicians never give out such figures even though they have easy access to those figures. Our roadways, as every American must know, are deteriorating faster than they can be rebuilt. Roads that are in desperate need of rebuilding are patched which in itself is expensive. Roads deteriorate not just from age, but also from the volume of traffic they carry. The greater the traffic load, the faster the deterioration. And that is extremely expensive. Conversely, rail transportation can withstand increased use far better and much longer. It only makes sense to shift traffic from roads to rails.
America would do well to take the lessons learned in Stockholm and other European and Asian countries that have adequately addressed their country’s transportation needed. The solution to America’s traffic congestion is not easy but it does exist.
Why We Need AMTRAK, and More of It!
There was a time when you could get on a train in your hometown and travel to just about any other town in the United States. That was before the Interstate highway system, and before America started its love affair with the automobile. To be fair, travel by passenger train was on the decline before either of those two things happened. The nation’s improved road system of the 1920, the emergence of the intercity bus, and the emergence of the truck all had an effect on passenger rail traffic. But the Interstate highway system and low-cost air fare were the death knell for intercity passenger rail. By the time AMTRAK came into being in 1971 intercity passenger rail service was on life support. Only four railroads opted out of the initial AMTRAK system: the Boston & Maine Railroad, the Southern Railroad, the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, and the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. AMTRAK cut the existing routes in half and started business as a government entity.
From its inception there was acknowledgement for the need of certain “corridor” passenger rail service. These were seen as likely money-makers for the new system. The original plan was to somehow turn a profit on the other non-corridor routes. That was pure pie-in-the-sky thinking of course. During the Reagan years there was a movement to shut down AMTRAK entirely if it could not live without a subsidy, which it could not of course. Gasoline was still relatively cheap in those days and it was generally assumed that our transportation infrastructure could survive quite well without AMTRAK outside of a few named corridors.
Fortunately forward thinkers of the day kept the system alive. The Clinton administration brought some long overdue cash infusion into the system. A true high-speed route from Boston to New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC was put in place. That high-speed still pales in comparison to high-speed trains in Europe or Japan but it is still pretty good.
Over the past 10 years patronage on AMTRAK has climbed significantly, particularly in the corridors, the Northeast, Detroit/Chicago/St. Louis, and San Diego/Los Angeles/San Francisco. Even more, the government has identified a number of other potential corridors that need to be developed in the future on top of improving the existing ones.
True high-speed rail will make AMTRAK competitive with the airlines in what is referred to as “short-haul.” Cities like Chicago and Detroit, or Chicago and St. Louis with true high-speed rail can be two or three hours apart on the train. High speed rail would also make an overnight trip New York to Chicago and other mid-west cities possible. You could board a sleeper at Penn Station in New York at 8 in the evening and arrive in Chicago by 8 the next morning. Even better, it is from one downtown location to another. Some good planning and using existing technology will give Americans a via alternative to both the automobile and the airplane.
We are approaching $4 a gallon gasoline. But people also need to realize that aviation fuel prices are also rising and will be reflected in air fares, even on discount airlines. The upward movement of fuel prices is unlikely to change ever again. There will be fluctuations, of course, but in the long-term prices are going to rise considerably as world demand rises and world supply plateaus and falls.
The time will come when Americans will be clamoring for more rail service because they will realize it to be the most affordable transportation available to them. But our investment has to come now. The price of that investment has to go up as the years pass. One time investments in the straightening of railroad rights-of-way, necessary for good high-speed rail, is at its least expensive right now.
The necessity for a good and comprehensive passenger rail system in America is not speculation. It is going to be a necessity at some future date, that is an absolute. How we deal with our future is a choice we have to make now. Economically, the amount a fuel needed to transport 1000 people between any two cities via rail is far less than any other mode of transportation that now exists. That translation will become evident to all Americans in the future. How well we are able to deal with it in the future is dictated by our actions now.
If you want to see what a first class rail system looks like go to Europe. Get on a train in Paris and go to Rome. The entire trip, the same distance as New York to Chicago, takes 12 hours. The New York to Chicago trip takes 18 hours. There are two trains from New York to Chicago, and four Paris to Rome. There are actually many more trains between Paris and Rome, those four are just the high-speed trains. In the U.S., there are only two New York to Chicago trains regardless of speed.
It is time Americans came to accept what Europeans and Asians have known for decades. Americans have to accept the fact that we need trains, more of them, and faster.
The Immediate Need For Greatly Improved Public Transportation
When I was a kid, I remember my father buying gasoline for twenty-five cents. That was in the late 1950s. Then, in 1967 and early 1968 I worked at a service station where I saw regular gasoline prices at thirty cents. But that was when we imported less than 50% of our oil. In 1974 we saw that changed suddenly with the organization of OPEC. Whatever people may think of OPEC, it was formed as a result of American and British oil companies in the middle east indubitably sharing their profits. The main American company was called the Arab American Oil Company, or ARAMCO. Justifiably the hosting nations took exception to the many decades of foreign oil interests in their countries. Our import oil prices doubled which led to a quick increase at the pumps, from an average of 35 cents to 55 cents. I remember rationing and long lines at the oil pumps. The 24-hour service station temporarily ceased to exist in many places. That meant traveling at night required a lot of planning when you were going long distances. At the time I was traveling from Virginia to Massachusetts.
I do not see such things happening again in our immediate future but it is in our future. There is no debate that it will happen, just when it will happen. America’s foray into the world of alternative sources of portable energy have been slow, mostly because at present the demand for such vehicles is still small. Also, Americans have adjusted to increasing oil prices rather smoothly and without a lot of complaint. The American love affair with the automobile has yet to end but it has been altered slightly. The old behemoths of the roadways are largely a thing of the past although relative gas economy really has not increased all that much. Large and mid-sized American cars are still wont to get much over 22 miles to the gallon in urban operation, and not a whole lot more in highway driving. For as much as automobile companies like Toyota and Honda boast about how economical their small car are, are they are, they still pale to known possibilities. But the known possibilities, electric primarily, lack for power and are somewhat limited in their distances. The problem is a simple one, once you leave your home with an electric automobile, the availability of a place to recharge you automobiles batteries are minimal.
That said, we have in place, somewhat, a public transportation system that can to some degree offset the use of automobiles. Unfortunately, most of the public does not understand the basic necessities of building, operating, and support of a comprehensive public transportation system. Simply put, Americans are spoiled by the Interstate highway system and lack confidence in the present public transportation system to fill their needs. The lone except to this are their airlines. Americans are very knowledgeable where airlines are concerned.
I read in the Boston Sunday Globe today that a plan for high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco is meeting with a high degree of opposition. Cited as the reasons are the high price of building such a rail link and the link’s lack of service to many of California’s major cities. It is obvious to me that the people have missed the most basic idea of the rail link, how to provide high-speed, in excess of 120 MPH, service between its two largest cities. The planners knew that building such a link along the coast, which would link most of California’s major cities, would have been unreasonably costly. But putting the line up the central valley and avoiding the coastal mountains, allowed a much lower price tag and a sure way to gain the high speeds necessary to make it a true high-speed rail link.
America trails the rest of the world in high-speed rail and other forms of public transportation. It is understandable that people living between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River may not see the need for increased public transportation in their areas. But the people in the rest of the country absolutely need it and sooner than later. Our day of gasoline reckoning is much closer than many want to admit but when it gets here unless we have made proper plans, we will be hurting for a long time.
Let me be clear on one point. Public transportation systems almost without exception bring in less than 50 cents in revenue for every dollar spent. Most public transportation systems have not covered their operating costs since the 1950s and some even before that. That means tax dollars make up the difference. We have to accept that for our future and learn how to properly fund our public transportation. What every American has to understand that public transportation exists for the common good. There is a trade-off regardless of what you support. If you decease public transportation then you necessarily increase the use of private cars on our streets and highways. Those are your only options.
All of our urban transportation systems were designed in the early 20th Century when most Americans lived in urban areas. The mass production of the automobile shifted our population centers and created the suburbs. In the early 1900s when you left the city you were almost immediately in the country. That is no longer true. If you look at the rail route from New York City to Philadelphia you find almost a continuous urban and suburban type of population. In 1900, you left New York and Newark urban areas and went into the countryside until you reached the small city of Trenton. Then back into the countryside until you reached Philadelphia. There is virtually no countryside left along that stretch with the invention of the suburbs and their linking highways. Even more, the now populous urban centers in Florida, Texas and California were virtually non-existent in 1900. In the case of California, an extremely well planned and extensive public transportation system was virtually dismantled by 1960 and has cost the state billions of dollars to just start its recreation.
In the early 1990s U.S. transportation planners gathered and invited urban planners from Europe and Japan to help identify and plan a comprehensive U.S. system of public transportation. All forms of public transportation were taken into consideration to include bicycles and pedestrians. To put this all in perspective, the U.S. is roughly 3.7 million square miles and Europe is roughly 3.9 square miles in area but there is no comparison between the two in transportation. While the U.S. has a vastly superior road system, it has a vastly inferior public transportation system. To be fair, the population of Europe is more than double that of the U.S. But that only excuses the U.S. relative to those areas west of the Mississippi.
Massachusetts has invested billions of dollars in its public transportation systems, primarily the MBTA which now carries more than $3 billion in debt. The MBTA is threatening serious service cutbacks if the status-quo is maintained. At the heart of the problem is an aging system, both in infrastructure and equipment. Reductions in service only provide a disincentive to the public to use the system. The MBTA, of course, is not the only system that is being forced into making such decisions. People want a high level of public transportation but do not understand how much it costs to maintain such a system. Large fare increases can only be offset but increased tax subsidies. Such subsidies are generally collected at the gas pump in the form of state and federal taxes, and sometimes city taxes. People in urban states wonder why their gasoline taxes are higher than the more rural states and this, along with road maintenance, is precisely why.
the AMTRACK system has been under attack almost since its inception. It has been threatened with elimination numerous times if it did not cover its operating costs with its fares. Such a suggestion is ludicrous. It also goes against the basic premise of public transportation, a service for the public good. Long distance AMTRACK service has been the most seriously attacked. Such attacks are penny wise and pound foolish.
People need to understand that the standards used for freight service and passenger service are extremely different. The standard for passenger service requires a certain type of rail be used and that the rail be at a particular condition as regards the speed of service allowed. That is, while freight service at speeds between 40 and 60 MPH maximum are acceptable along a particular route, passenger service along that same route at such speeds is unacceptable and unsupportable. The concerns for the right-of-way in determining the speed at which a passenger train can travel is the weight of the rail per foot, the age of the rail, the signaling available, the upkeep of the rail bed, and the straightness of the rail. Freight trains can operate safely in lesser conditions.
Then there is the capital equipment needed. A single six car train with a diesel-electric engine can cost close to $5 million or more depending on use. They have a lifetime of about 20 years. They must be maintained and maintenance costs for any particular piece of equipment necessarily goes up with age. Again simply put, imagine yourself having to maintain a car you bought in 1992. That is exactly what many transportation systems are having to do with the rail and bus equipment. It defies logic except that funding for new equipment is not supplied.
I am putting this in terms of rail transportation because railroads are abandoning rail lines that are no longer profitable. The thing is, some of these lines are extremely desirable in terms of inter-city and long distance passenger travel. But once abandoned, these rights-of-way will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to resurrect. Not only that, the cost of bringing a line in disuse to a level where passenger service is viable is very expensive and that price will only increase as time goes on. What I am saying is that even minimal service along many routes is desirable in the long-term. Those long distance trains that ply rural states such as Montana and Wyoming may seem like a waste of funding but they are not. There is a level of maintenance that is happening that when the need for these routes increases it will be no great problem to increase service along them. That day will come. It is not an “if” but a “when.”
There are three investments which need to be made now. The first is in urban transportation, the second in inter-city transportation, and the third in long distance transportation. The price tag will be in the many tens of billions of dollars per year but it is an investment that will yield large returns for all Americans. Such investments will reduce the wear on our roads and highways. It will decrease our need for imported oil. It will guarantee us a via transportation system in an emergency. It is a delayed gratification benefit which is always one of the best benefits anyone can experience.
You Didn't Ask But..... 